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ATTE
Attention is the portal of our
experience, the gatekeeper of all
we know and love and hope to
avoid. It keeps us alive, tipping
us off to tempting foodstuffs and
warning of dangers hurtling at us
from the corner of our eye.

ENTION
by Eric Sorensen

The deadline approaches.
I’ve seen it coming for weeks
but keep getting pulled away by
the incessant distractions of my
modern, connected office life:
desk phone, cell phone, window,
and the eternal promise of
serendipitous discovery offered by
what I call the TV on my desk. At
any moment, my email inbox, blog
reader, news sites, social networks,
and several hundred fellow
Twitterers might thrill me with a
heretofore unknown fact.
The late Mariner’s broadcaster
Dave Niehaus was the first to call
Alex Rodriguez “A-Rod.”
Alaskan sled dogs perform best
at 0 degrees F.
A Facebook friend in a Dallas
diner has posted a picture of his
breakfast “schnitzel”—a breaded
pork medallion with grits, sautéed
spinach and hollandaise.
This just in: NPR has a books page.
It’s almost enough to make
me miss the days when a writer’s
main distraction was a pencil in
need of sharpening. But not quite.
Unstated in most complaints
about distractions is that we like
many of them, which is why we let
them distract us.

3

But they do cut into a precious but
largely unappreciated sector of human
capital: our attention.
Attention is the portal of our
experience, the gatekeeper of all we know
and love and hope to avoid. It keeps us
alive, tipping us off to tempting foodstuffs
and warning of dangers hurtling at us
from the corner of our eye. It alerts us to
possible mates.
All while weeding out billions of bits
of information a second to focus on just
enough to think, react, and remember.
The “skillful management of attention
is the sine qua non of the good life,”
writes Winifred Gallagher in Rapt:
Attention and the Focused Life, “and the
key to improving virtually every aspect

of your experience, from mood to
productivity to relationships.”
Our attention is also central to
our economic and political life. Whole
industries exist simply to bring products
to your attention. Our democracy is
based on the premise that, when you
raise your voice, someone will listen.
But now it seems our attention is
atomized among a greater set of options.
Our growing attention deficit is
insidious: It’s hard to know you’re not
paying attention to something when,
well, you’re not paying attention to
it. That’s how you get scads of people
talking and texting while they drive.
They think they’re paying attention to
two things at once. They aren’t. They

can’t be. They could drive past a gorilla
and not see it.
We might have seen this coming.
The social scientist Herbert Simon
did in 1971, a quarter century before
the flowering of the Internet, when he
noted “a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention.”
Information is the new coin of
our realm, but we see it in a fleeting,
superficial, “ooh, shiny” way. Vast
quantities of knowledge wash over us
and we lie mute and mouth-breathing
on the couch, our hand paralyzed on the
remote. We may even be witnessing the
defeat of the information age, but only if
we are paying attention.

We may even be witnessing the defeat of the information age, but only if we are paying attention.”

4

Calling All Neurons

Some things require little or no
attention, like tying a shoe for the
4,000th time.
Then there are situations in which
attention must be paid, like when a siren
passes outside the window, activating
our automatic orienting response. Try
to ignore it, but it’s already caught your
attention. The modern world is lousy
with such distractions, distractions for
which we are not quite evolved.
“You have sounds, you have smells,
you have sights that are all going to
command and fight for your attention,”
says Craig Parks, a professor of psychology
whose work on groups has him
interested in the role of attention in
social settings. “In prehistory you just
didn’t have that. And one argument at
least on the socio-psychological side
that you sometimes see is that, in an
evolutionary sense, our ability to adapt
to competing demands on our attention
has not evolved as rapidly as those
competing sources have evolved.”

Between the extremes of minimal, automatic attention (shoe tying) and
mandatory attention (sirens) lies a world in which our attention is, millisecond by
millisecond, weighing its options. It can only handle so much, so it plays the odds.
This is a big concern of Lisa Fournier, an associate professor of psychology whose
research focuses on selective attention, perception, and action. When she told test
subjects that the odds were even that they would see an object in one of two
places, they divided their attention evenly between the two. But when the odds
went to 70–30, they tended to focus on the higher probability place.
“There seems to be some biases in the system that you can actually set up in terms of
what it is you’re going to attend to and then those things you’re more susceptible to see,”
says Fournier. If you’re driving a car, she says, you might expect oncoming traffic. Or in a
rural area, you might expect an animal to jump out into the road.

Functional Blindness
Distractions can cause two types of functional blindness.

Change blindness is when a distracted

person fails to notice subtle changes, such
as “goofs” in movies.

Inattention blindness occurs when people
are concentrating on one particular thing
and do not notice unusual occurrences,
such as a person in a gorilla suit.

But if things get challenging—an
unexpected bicyclist appears, or an angry
friend calls on the cell—it’s going to get
harder to see.
In a widely cited Science study, British
researchers had subjects watch a screen
on which dots expanded outward. When
the dots froze after a minute or so, the
test subjects got the illusion that they
had changed direction. This is called the
motion after-effect.
Then researchers put words over the
dots and asked participants to press a key
when upper-case words appeared, or press
a key when a two-syllable word appeared.
The second task was harder—a “highload linguistic task”—as each word had to
be read and evaluated. And that’s when
researchers saw the motion after-effect
decrease.Through functional brain imaging,
they also saw reduced motion processing
when subjects were busy recognizing the
two-syllable words.
The study, says Fournier, shows that
the cells sensitive to motion are actually
less sensitive when you’re attending to
something else.
This could have implications for driving,
where more than one-third of accidents
are due to inattention or errors of
perception. If you’re engaged in something
a bit challenging, like a cell phone
conversation, you may be less sensitive
to motion outside the windshield, says
Fournier. You may try to give equal weight
to watching the road and talking, but talking
is a high-load linguistic task and can be a
complicated act of social navigation.
“It can be very engaging,” says Fournier,
so you have a lot less of your attention
dedicated to driving. “We do know that
when someone is super-engaged with a
cell phone, his or her driving is similar to
that of a drunk driver.”
In a practical sense, the cell-phone
yakking driver may be functionally blind.
One form of this is “change blindness.”
When test subjects look at a series of
pictures with subtle changes between
them, they have a hard time picking up
differences that don’t alter the picture’s

meaning.You can perform this
test yourself. Watch a movie, then
look up its “goofs” page on the
Internet Movie Database. Dozens
of mistakes will have eluded you:
sudden changes to Richard Gere’s
wardrobe in Pretty Woman, an electric
lamp in the nineteenth century setting of
Gone with the Wind, a ’60s era Cessna in
the ’40s era Godfather.
“What this suggested to researchers
is that attention itself is very important
for perception,” says Fournier. “It’s not
just what hits the eye and hits the visual
cortex. What you select out, what you’re
looking at, how you’re interpreting the
picture, etc., is very important.”
Then there’s “inattention blindness.”
In one of the most popular attention
studies ever, test subjects watched
videos of people passing a basketball
and were told to count the passes of
either a team in white shirts or a team
in black shirts. Afterwards, they were
asked if they saw anything unusual.
One-third of the time, they had not
noticed a woman walking across the
screen with an umbrella. More than half
the time, their attention was so absorbed
by the ball passing that they didn’t see a
person walk by in a gorilla suit.
Fournier likens attention to a
spotlight centering on one thing. The
more demanding the task, the narrower
and more concentrated the light’s
focus, to the exclusion of things on the
darkened periphery.
“There’s only so much you can process
at one time,” she says.
In other words, we have precious little
attention to give—much less than we even
think we have.
Compounding this is how our high-tech
world is throwing things at us at a greater rate.
“Sometimes it can be just overwhelming
to stay on a certain task, particularly when
you have to write, to really focus,” says
Fournier, whose own distractions include
seven-year-old twins. “When you have an
idea, and you’re interrupted, that idea
can just be lost.”

... we
have
precious
little
attention
to give—
much
less than
we even
think we
have.”

5

Attention Shoppers

6

As our world has filled with attentiongrabbing technologies, the people whose
job relies on getting our attention—
TV outlets, radio stations, websites,
advertisers—have been scrambling to,
as they say, cut through the clutter. A
lot is at stake, from whole product lines
to the education of students to the
marketplace of ideas in a democracy.
But oftentimes, the clamor for eyeballs
has only added to the clutter. In some
instances, like the video game, media
have succeeded in drawing our attention
to the shine and not the substance,
catching our eyes while our minds stay
stuck in neutral.
It’s the Tower of Babel, with a light
show, and it poses problems for both
consumers and those who want their
message seen and heard.
Consumers, children included, can be
the first to suffer.
Young children lack the judgment
to tell if an ad is for their benefit or
someone else’s—information
or persuasion.
Sesame Street picked up on this and
was among the first to figure out how
to hold a child’s attention by keeping
segments short and changing them often.
Power sees yet another technique in
video games, which can hold a player’s
attention for hours by scaffolding the
action, luring participants from one level
to the next.
Attention is often borne out of an
individual’s values and motivations. In the case
of a scaffolded video game, it’s the machine
that maintains attention, not the person.
There is one place where it is
generally accepted that it’s good to get
your audience’s attention: the classroom.
It’s becoming a tough room to work.
“There’s a whole range of things
that are in play,” says Olusola Adesope,
an assistant professor in educational
psychology whose interests include
learning with multimedia resources.

“Nothing is controlled,” he says. “You
have hungry kids. You have kids whose
parents have just broken up. You have
kids who, maybe their sister just had a
kid last week and they’re thinking about
that. You have someone who was just
asked out on a date last night. You’re
dealing with these varied abilities in
terms of interest.”
On top of that, students can text on
cell phones and take notes on wirelessly
connected laptops.
When I visit Adesope, he has
up on his computer screen a paper
called, “How seductive details do their
damage.” Seductive details are basically
the carnival barker that gets you into
the tent—interesting, but of little
educational value. But such research is
generally done in controlled laboratory
settings without the distractions of social
lives or technology. To punch through
that, says Adesope, teachers need to
rise above the muted technique of the
cool, gentle professor who “runs the risk
of losing these kids.”
As a child in Nigeria, Adesope
himself learned the periodic table of
elements from a chemistry teacher who
translated it into songs.
“I’ve seen professors, I’ve seen good
teachers, interject their lectures with
music,” he says. “They’re singing, or they
start playing.These are little tricks that
could potentially work. Dealing with these
students, we can’t force them to shut up
their computers. We can seduce them.”

“We’re hard-wired to
pay attention when
it looks like people
are talking to us.
Which makes perfect
common sense.

Now That I Have Your Attention

And that carries over
into the media world.”

Attention Marketing an advertising
“If you’re in the business of trying to
agency uses many of the latest tools and
get people to learn information, you have
techniques to be seen and heard: websites, to be careful trying to have that, ‘oh, shiny’
TV commercials, social media.They know
road too much,” says Bolls, an associate
a bit about giving and getting attention
professor of strategic communication at
and appreciates, Sesame Street-style ads,
the Missouri School of Journalism. “While
moving fast between edits.
that strategy is good at capturing this
Two seconds is about the attention span short-term working memory attention,
of adults today.
oftentimes, particularly in the media
But it could be that the fast-moving
world, it actually interferes with learning.”
stream of media images and ideas can only
Bolls is now working on ways to
do so much to get its point across, even
make journalism rise above the din
when it does catch our eyes and ears.
by being more compelling, engaging,
Washington State Universities
and memorable. In unpublished
College of Business looked at how the
research presented to an International
number of visual cuts in a television
Communication Association conference,
commercial affected viewers’ attention.
he found that some of the most
They showed subjects 12 30-second
captivating and memorable political
advertisements—six fast-paced ones
ads “consisted of a candidate just simply
with 11 or more cuts and six slowtalking to the camera, having a discussion.”
paced ones with three or fewer cuts.
He was surprised, extrapolating from
The participants’ automatic orienting
the early work showing faster pacing
response was monitored by electrodes
captured attention.
that could detect subtle changes in sweat,
“In terms of media production, one
an electrolyte and indicator of arousal.
thing that will also reliably, automatically
Afterwards, they were asked to recall
engage attention is someone looking at a
what they saw.
camera as if they’re talking to you,” he says.
The faster paced the commercial, “We’re hard-wired to pay attention when
the more it captured the viewers’
it looks like people are talking to us. Which
orienting response. But it was
makes perfect common sense. And that
only drawing attention to the
carries over into the media world.”
ad’s execution, as the viewers
While machines seem to be
struggled to recall its
overloading us in an arcade of lights
content. The medium’s flash and noise, a human face and voice can
had overwhelmed
cut through the din and actually be
its message.
memorable. It’s a hard-wired thing: Our
If an advertiser
brain is designed to focus attention on
aims “to clearly
social things, so even if something is
communicate
fast-moving and electronic, we respond
product benefits,”
if people are at the end of it.
the authors wrote,
“Facebook is an example of that,” says
“a slower-paced
Bolls. “Twitter is an example of that.
advertisement (i.e.
LinkedIn. All forms of social media. That’s
one with fewer
why that’s so compelling.”
‘bits’ of information
It’s a reassuring thought: The original
presented) would social media—a person looking you
appear to be the in the eye and talking—still works.
advertisement
Especially when we look away from the
execution of
screen, or the person talking to us stops
choice.”
texting and puts away the phone.